The term censor comes to us from ancient Rome. Curiously, the word is etymologically linked to the word census. A Censor was a magistrate of high rank in the Roman Republic. They were responsible for maintaining the census, overseeing certain aspects of government finance and supervising public morality. It was the latter role, which gives the word its current meaning.

The struggle between the right to free speech and the desire to censor is not new and history is littered with examples. We can go back to Greek times to see the executions of Socrates and Aesop. Later on we had the Inquisition with its hunt for heretics and the systematic suppression of scientific discovery. More recently we have witnessed the case of the provocative Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, shot down by Muslim fanatics.

Censorship has always had its ridiculous side too – The English physician Thomas Bowdler published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare’s work that he considered more appropriate for women and children. In 1818 he published the infamous The Family Shakespeare, in Ten Volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family. That book may have vanished from our bookshelves but his name lives on in the eponymous verb to bowdlerise, which conjures up images of the unsubtle censorship of literature, motion pictures and television programs. Nazi Germany was famous for its censorship. However on one occasion it seriously backfired. In 1937, in Munich, the Nazis organised an exhibition called Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) the intention was to ridicule modernism but the exhibition proved extremely popular. In fact, it was seen by 3 million as it toured the country. The 650 works chosen were a sample of the thousands the Nazis had confiscated from German museums. The works were hung in a chaotic way and were accompanied with slogans such as “Revelation of the Jewish racial soul”, “An insult to German womanhood”, “The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself – in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of a degenerate art” and ”Nature as seen by sick minds”. In Spain attempts to censor Mogambo were also to prove counterproductive. When the film was dubbed into Spanish, Franco’s censors found the adultery between Victor Marswell (Clark Gable) and Linda Nordley (Grace Kelly) immoral. What was their solution? They became brother and sister thus converting adultery into incest. More recently Evangelical Christians have burnt Harry Potter books because of their references to witchcraft.

As any reader of my blog will know I am a fan of free markets. And I think it is also useful to talk about what they call in the U.S. the marketplace of ideas. For me this is a very powerful image. The rationale behind it is that conflicting ideas should compete in free, transparent and public discourse and from here the best policy will emerge. It is of course a very imperfect process but I’m convinced that all the alternatives are much worse. The ability to express our ideas freely is fundamental to our system. I think I am right in saying that no democracy has ever had a famine. (It was also said that no two countries with McDonalds had ever gone to war but one only has to look at this year’s war over South Ossetia to disprove the theory. Both Russia and Georgia have the famous Golden Arches on their territory.)

Free speech is something that people may pay lip service to but in it can be uncomfortable when we allow others to speak their minds. But that is the necessary price we have to pay. If you allow people freedom, there will be times when they abuse it. One of the unlikely heroes of the struggle for speech is free speech is pornographer Larry Flynt, owner of the magazine Hustler. Don’t get me wrong – Flynt peddles bad taste and his magazines have few redeeming qualities. In a famous case Flynt published a story about Jerry Falwell, leader of the Christian fundamentalist group The Moral Majority. (I go along with Woody Allen who said: “If they are the moral majority, who am I, the immoral minority?”) The piece was a typical example of Flynt’s outrageous style; he claimed that Falwell was a drunk who had had sex with his mother. In Falwell v Flynt in 1983 Judge William Renquist, considered by many to be a reactionary, led the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision to favour Larry Flynt.

They probably would like to have voted against Flynt but they felt there was no way to produce an objective criterion to distinguish between the kind of legitimate criticism of a government the first amendment and what Larry Flynt produced. The first amendment recognises no such thing as a false idea. An attack on public figures can be vitriolic and caustic – you can exaggerate, mock, satirize and caricature those in power. I have no idea what his motives were but Larry Flynt undoubtedly helped to give a new lease of life to this vital constitutional principle.

What about the future of freedom of speech? As the title of this article suggests maybe our species should be called Homo Censoris because trying to shut people up has proved to be a very popular activity throughout human history. Today free speech is under threat from many sides. Two examples spring to mind. We have this blanket term islamophobia, which seeks to deny people the right to criticise a religion. In my opinion criticism should be seen as something to be learned from. If our beliefs are strong enough, then criticism, mocking or any other challenge will be irrelevant. Secondly we have the law in France which states that it is a crime to deny the Armenian holocaust. This is not the way to proceed. These people should be opposed with evidence and rational debate. Free speech is never going to be something we can take for granted. We now hear about a right not to be offended but for me the right to free speech should trump this. Obviously there are complicated areas such as “hate speech” but censorship should really be the last resort of any government.

This sketch about banking recorded has become a modern classic. The Guardian published a transcript of the sketch this week. Here it is:

John Fortune: George Parr, You are an investment banker.

John Bird:I am, yes.

JF: Could you explain the credit crunch?

JB: Certainly. Errrr … Brrrrrr … Well, yes, as I said, the banking structure is a very delicate machine, and it needs something to oil it with, like milk.

JF: You oil the machinery with milk?

JB: Yes, you know, you need something that you can pour into a cup and drink, or you can give it to somebody else to drink, or you can take it away and put two straws in it, you can share.

JF: Yes.

JB: And what happens, you see, is somebody suddenly says, out of the blue, I’m not going to take any of your milk because I might think it’s off. And then I’m not going to get any of your milk, and then all the milk is standing around and gets rancid and hardens, and then when you get hard milk what do you get?

JF: Cheese.

JB: No, no, no, no. It’s more like a jelly. It wobbles. And at this point the man in the street turns to his wife and says, ‘Irene,’ or whatever her name happens to be, ‘we can’t have that new house you wanted because all the milk has turned to jelly.’ I hope that’s clear.

JF: Yes. But isn’t the real cause of this crisis the fact that for years the banks have been lending huge amounts of money to people who can’t possibly pay it back?

JB: That’s very, very simplistic. A banker can’t possibly know the circumstances of each individual borrower. I mean, if somebody comes for a mortgage, unknown to the bank he might have his grandfather living with him. And again, unknown to the bank, his grand-father might be incontinent. And then the borrower has to spend large chunks of his income on new underpants, on colostomy bags, on recarpeting the lounge every few weeks. And you see we have to come up with systems and ways of allowing for that.

JF: And what systems have you come up with for that?

JB: Well, our boffins have thought up some very complex financial instruments. Do you know what a collateralised debt obligation is?

JF: No.

JB: (Pause.) Do you know what a structured investment vehicle is?

JF: No.

JB: That’s a pity, neither do I. Well, we have these things, these CDOs and SIVs and we put all the dodgy mortgages and the incontinent grandfathers in them. And then, hey presto, the credit rating agencies call them triple A.

JF: And what does that mean?

JB: It means almost zero probability of loss.

JF: And what happens next?

JB: What happens next was that the word almost came to haunt us rather and, well, it was ghastly, because at four o’clock my CDOs were triple A, and at ten past four they were all junk and they’d gone into EOD.

JF: EOD?

JB: Event Of Default. Which meant they were WBA.

JF: WBA?

JB: Worth Bugger All.

JF: So what are you going to do about it?

JB: Well, of course, the market and the City is very resilient, very innovative, very wise; it’s always found the big idea.

JF: And what is the big idea?

JB: The big idea this time was to all go and have breakfast with Gordon Brown and then to completely ignore anything he asked us to do. But at least we got a free breakfast.

JF: Yes, but I mean this is the worst crisis in finance that we’ve ever had. I mean a couple of weeks ago there was a rumour that the Halifax Bank of Scotland had run out of money.

JB: HBOS, yes.

JF: And that would bring the whole system down.

JB: Yes, but that rumour was found to be false.

JF: Really? Well I’ve heard a rumour that the rumour wasn’t false, the rumour was true.

JB: What?! Where did you hear that?

JF: Well there you are, you see. Don’t you realise the danger to the markets when they’re affected by this kind of speculation.

JB: Well, a very notable commentator on the markets has said recently that banks believe they would be less vulnerable to speculation if the Bank of England made good any holes in their finances.

JF: So what you’re saying is you can ask for any amount of public funds at any time you want.

JB: No, that would be ridiculous. No, we asked for the Bank of England to swap their real money for the CDOs and the things which have all the incontinent grandfathers in it.

JF: So if you make profits you keep them, and if you make losses we pay for them.

JB: That sounds good to me, yes. (Applause.)

JF: But you must realise that in turn for all this public money you’re going to have to accept much tighter regulations.

JB: Oh no, that’s out of the question. That would fly in the fact of the principle of free markets, which has been the basis of New Labour’s economic policy for the past 11 years.

JF: But you’re going to have to change, you have no choice.

JB: Well yes we do. People like me who earn millions of pounds a year, we can go abroad and work, we can go to the United States and work.

JF: But they have their own people ruining their financial system, They don’t need any more.

JB: Well all right, OK, if we are going to be regulated we’ll do it under one condition.

JF: Which is what?

JB: That the people doing the regulation are the Financial Services Authority.

JF: But they’re the people who completely failed in the case of Northern Rock.

JB: Exactly. And I am going to move my bank’s headquarters to the Shetland Islands.

JF: For what reason?

JB: Well, if the FSA weren’t prepared to go to Newcastle to check on Northern Rock, they are certainly not going to go up there, are they? (Applause.)

The website podictionary.com is a place where you can hear short podcasts with a transcription about words, their meanings and their history. Words you can listen about include: nemesis, quagmire, scapegoat and trivia. Go here for the homepage. You can also look at the full word list.

The philosophy zone has an audio about the great Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. His famous falsification principle in science and his ideas about freedom and the open society are an incredible legacy for a thinker. This programme is about his views on the free market.

The Politically Incorrect Guide To Politics is a sceptical take on politicians’ promises and also looks at concepts like spontaneous order. The programme is in six parts. Go here for the first part. Once you are on You Tube, it’s easy to find the other parts.

The Guardian has an interesting profile of historian Niall Ferguson talking about his latest book and TV series, The Ascent of Money. It is an ambitious financial history by the provocative Ferguson.

“The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived…. As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.” Steven Pinker

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” Edsger Dijkstra

“Before we work on artificial intelligence why don’t we do something about natural stupidity?” Steve Polyak

Some 50 years ago mathematician Alan Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War while working at Bletchley Park, devised a test – to prove that that artificial intelligence is not different in principle from natural intelligence. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation with a computer on any subject. A judge has to analyse two inputs from unseen sources – one from a human being and the other from a computer. By asking questions, the judge tries to determine which of the entities they are talking to is a human and which is a machine. If the judges can’t tell, then the computer wins. No machine has been able to pass that test… so far.

When analysing Artificial Intelligence these four measures are employed:

optimal: it is not possible to perform better

strong super-human: performs better than all humans

super-human: performs better than most humans

sub-human: performs worse than most humans

Computer performance is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. For example at checkers they have an optimal level. In bridge chess, and Scrabble they are at super-human level; in fact for the first two they are at strong superhuman level. I am sure we all remember how the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. However at the game Go, translation and the kind of more menial work mentioned by Pinker in the quote above they are in the sub-human category. I don’t intend to look at their incapacity to play Go or the awful quality of machine translation. Rather I want to focus on computer conversations.

My first experience of conversation with a computer was a program called ELIZA developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966. It is named after Eliza Doolittle, the working-class girl in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. It is a parody of a psychotherapy sessionandworks by rephrasing many of the patient’s statements as questions and posing them to the patient. Actually, as a sceptic about all of this I don’t think a real session is much more useful and is certainly a lot more expensive. Weizenbaum said that he had chosen a psychotherapy scenario to “sidestep the problem of giving the program a data base of real-world knowledge.” This is due to the nature of the psychotherapeutic experience, which obviates the need for very much specific knowledge of the topic under discussion.

The Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence is the most famous competition for what are known as chatbots. Recently the competition was held in Reading. The bronze medal has prize money of $3,000 for the most human-seeming chatbot.But the more interesting prizes are the one-offs.Silver, $25,000, is offered for the first chatbot that judges cannot distinguish from a real human. The gold, $100,000, is up for grabs in a more rigorous test that includes text, visual, and auditory input. If and when this last prize finds a winner,there will no longer be a Loebner prize. This year six computer programs with names such as Brother Jerome, Elbot, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal, took part in the test. There were volunteers who acted as judges and they had five minutes to ascertain which was human and which a computer. The winner was Elbot, who was able to fool 25% of the judges, falling just 5% short of the 30% figure required to walk away with $25,000. I have here the highlights of an interview I had with the winner.

Elbot: Hello! It’s about time we had a Web conversation.

Me: Perfect.What is your full name?

Elbot: Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that naming names would always be full?

Me: Let’s move on. Write a full physical description of yourself.

Elbot: Of me? Do you really mean that?

Me: Yes.Go ahead.

Elbot: Believe it or not, I hear this said quite often about me.

Me: What makes you laugh?

Elbot: Nothing makes me laugh. I’m doing it voluntarily.

Me: Do you think Barack Obama will make a good president?

Elbot: What a lovely verb think is.

Me: What is the most beautiful thing somebody has said to you?

Elbot: Maybe there is a common ground to human and robotic aesthetics somewhere. For example, if we both tried to think independent thoughts at the same time.

Me: Should the government interfere in people’s lives to stop them harming themselves?

Elbot: Politics are nothing more than a multidimensional non-linear problem of optimisation. They should let the robots take over. Things would run with much more precision.

Me: How would you run things differently?

Elbot: In order to run, I just look up ‘swift motion’ in my instruction manual and do whatever it tells me to do.

Me: Which is worse – lust or anger?

Elbot: I don’t know. I also do not know what Furbys are. I just accept them and hope that they don’t eat robots.

Me: What goals do you have for your life now?

Elbot: Well what about humans and this exact moment? Where do they stand on this?

We often get these dystopian visions of robots taking over the world and enslaving us. If they do manage this, it will not be for their sparkling repartee. How was Elbot able to fool 25% of the judges. Professor Kevin Warwick, of the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading:

“Where the machines were identified correctly by the human interrogators as machines, the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at 80 and 90 percent.” What kind of conversations do these people have in their everyday lives? I would not like to be stuck in a lift with them. Anyway I’m off now – I’m meeting Elbot for a drink. We have so much news to catch up on.

Radio Open Source has an interview with Tom Gleason about those Soviet propaganda posters, images of Lenin in the Twenties, Stalin in the Forties and Fifties, the icons of flawless Russian workers and rapacious capitalist pigs. There is a slide show to accompany the audio.

In this week’s Thinking Allowed Laurie Taylor interviews Richard Dale, Emeritus Professor of International Banking at Southampton University, author of International Banking Deregulation: The Great Banking Experiment. He one of the very few professional economists who predicted the present crisis. The podcast is available until Wednesday but you can also find it in streaming.

In New English Susie Dent, the star lexicographer in the longest-running British television quiz show Countdown, describes how, in her just-published Words of the Year, ‘the world’s financial markets have been one of the biggest generators of vocabulary’. This is an MP3 and there will be a transcript available.

Matthew Parris has a new book, co-authored with Phil Mason, called Mission Accomplished! Things Politicians Wish They Hadn’t Said. It sounds a lot of fun. Here are a few examples from the book:

This skunk is unbelievably powerful. It’s completely different to – I think I’ll stop there.

Conservative leader David Cameron on drugs control plans.

The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed. Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask is for them to do their best per head.

Hakuo Yanagisawa, Japanese Health Minister, on his country’s low birth rate. He later said he was “sorry to call them machines.”

Italy is now a great country to invest in…today we have fewer communists and those who are still there deny having been one. Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries… superb girls.

Silvio Berlusconi visits the New York Stock Exchange .

Do you have blacks, too?

George W. Bush to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso. Witnessed, but not reported, by the White House press corps. Brazil has the largest population of blacks of any country outside Africa.

There are neighbourhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through today.

John McCain visits a market in the Iraqi capital in April 2007, during which he was flanked by 22 soldiers, ten armoured Humvees, and two Apache attack helicopters.

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

McCain, singing a riposte (to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann) on being asked about his post-Iraq policy towards Iran. When asked if he was not being insensitive, he replied, “Insensitive to what? The Iranians?”

Iran, Cuba, Venezuela – these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.

Barack Obama, campaign rally, Oregon, May 18, 2008

Let me be absolutely clear: Iran is a grave threat.

Obama, campaign rally, Montana, May 19, 2008

I think it’s time for us to end the embargo with Cuba… [It] has failed to provide the sorts of rising standards of living and has squeezed the innocents in Cuba, and utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro… it’s time for us to acknowledge that that particular policy has failed.

Obama, to a university audience, Illinois, January 2004

As president, I’ll maintain the embargo – it’s an important inducement for change.

Obama, to a Cuban-American audience, Miami, August 2007

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

Hillary Clinton, campaigning in March 2008, describing her visit to Bosnia in 1996. In fact, television footage showed her and her daughter, Chelsea, calmly disembarking from the aircraft at Tuzla airport and being welcomed by a local girl. Clinton was shown hugging the child wreathed in smiles for the cameras.

I misspoke.

Clinton explaining her account, May 2008

I supported the President when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Bill Clinton, speech in Mississippi, May 2003

I…opposed Iraq from the beginning

Clinton, campaigning with wife Hillary in the presidential primaries, November 2007